Of course, the output can only be as good as the available speech synthesiser. Unfortunately, e speak is all I have to work with. Better than nothing, and a limitation that a paid for quality synthsiser would fix... In practice, the package shouldn't be too difficult to modify should a better speech synthesiser become available. But I don't have one to try!

Sleepy though I currently am,
I just suddenly realised that I forgot to include a usage
help for yasr itself. A bit of an oversight that I will fix tomorrow.
I'll upload a new dotpet 0.9.5 with that on the menu then.

Unfortunately, the name alteration has involved some relatively minor cut and paste documentation alterations,
some documentation file renaming, as well as some menu coding alterations.
The new dotpet menusp reflects these additions. This version has a GPLv3 license only. I'm pretty certain that all the included apps in the package are GPL of one sort or another, but it would be good if you'd check on their websites for yourself, in case I blunder in that regard!
I'm currently also developing a version compatible for the ubuntu family,
but that is taking second place in my priorities at present.

Eventually I'll put the project's documentation in some revision control system to make it easier to handle, but I'm not ready to do that at the moment. In the meantime, if you have any documentation samples of your own (or menusp customisations) that you would like to be considered for inclusion just post them in.

For the moment I'm keeping a simple notebook (along with Notecase) for noting words and phrases that I need to improve or fix to make them spoken more clearly by the speech synthesiser. It would thus be good if you could post a file with any such words/phrases etc that you notice in your testing, for adding to my own notes and todo list. You can either post such an erratum here or to:

wiakapps *AT* wiak *dot* org

The overall erratum is undoubtedly large, so I may take a while implementing all the necessary changes.Last edited by mcewanw on Thu 06 Mar 2008, 21:13; edited 1 time in total

I'm working on configuration issues at the moment, prior to adding some config options to menusp etc. In the meantime you may find the following info useful, if you haven't already discovered it yourself. Note that these are "aural" only configurations, for a blind user - you don't see anything happening on the screen; you have to listen to what is going on:

When yasr the speech reader is enabled you can change most of its options on the fly, including whether to echo typed text or not. Here is a short list of options I know about so far:

1. With yasr enabled, to enter the yasr options menu you should enter the key combination:

ctrl alt o

If you then press letter k it will aurally tell you the current key echo state.

Pressing the space bar cycles you through the possibilities: off, keys, word

Once you have the one you want, you should press the escape key. Yasr then announces it is leaving the options menu.

To test the effect of what you just did, I recommend that you try typing something, for example in v i, so that you can hear what difference the new option makes. For example, if you have set key echo to "word", then everytime you have finished typing a word, the word will be echoed. If you have set key option to "keys" every key press will be echoed.

2. After pressing ctrl alt o for the option menu:

If you then press letter u it will tell you the current effect of pressing the up and down cursor arrow keys.

Pressing the space bar cycles you through the possibilities: speak line, speak character, or speak word

Once you reach the one you want it to be, press escape key to leave the options menu and save your new configuration with ctrl alt s as you did before.

3. Similarly after ctrl alt o, pressing key c allows you to alter the assignment for "cursor tracking". Again you use the space bar to cycle through the possibilities, and then press escape key and ctrl alt s to save whatever you have selected. Once again you can test the effect in v i; best to type a few lines of text first and then try moving around.

4. One special case after a ctrl alt o, is key s. This has multiple options assigned to it. Each time you press s, a different option starting with the letter s is announced. The options cycled through are:

synthesiser option, synthesiser port, shell, and, split caps.

Most of these are pretty technical and you won't want to alter them.
[Edit] Maybe you do! synthsiser option is very useful, see next post.

Again, the space bar is used to assign new preset values to whichever one you are interested in. Then you press escape and ctrl alt s to save as before.

Finally, there is another way of doing it...

Once you press ctrl alt o to change an option, you can use the up and down cursor keys to cycle through all the possible options. You can change any option thus reached by using the space bar, as before, or by using the cursor left and right arrow keys to assign a new value.

It may all sound a bit complicated, but I found either method easy once I'd tried it a couple of times and got the idea.

I'm still working on what options can be changed altogether, so that is all I know about configuring yasr at this time.

Tap the right cursor key once to hear the word "rate"
space bar (or a further tap on the right cursor key) lets you then alter
that rate (i.e. the speed of e speak speaking). If you change you mind
about entering a new value, press escape key to abort, and then continue
selecting options if you wish by pressing s (or the up/down cursor key).

Alternatively, one you first hear the word "rate", continually tapping
down cursor key will take you through all of the synthesiser options:
rate, pitch, volume, language, output module (for cases where you have an
alternative speech synthesiser to e speak), punctuation (whatever
punctuation you want spoken)

Then press escape key to leave the options and ctrl alt s to save as before.

The new 0.9.6 includes the latest compilations of espeak and speech-dispatcher. The bug with "less than signs" not being read out in edbrowse, etc, has now been fixed.

Expanded menusp included and a new setup script, fokssetup, which should be run immediately after the dotpet has been installed. NOTE: it is important that you uninstall any previous version before installing this new one.

Best to read the provided installREADME.txt carefully and not miss out any steps.

initsp now renamed to: ifoksy
menusp now renamed to: foksy
The foksy menu has undergone some major restructuring and some tidying up.
foksy now has a few simple options,
enter: foksy -? or foksy --help for brief usage details.

I'll be creating an addon for extra fokSyf Eye R compatible applications soon once I've compiled and tested some. The current "eXtra" menu item is currently just a skeleton. However, a somewhat pre-configured version of Brltty, as promised some time back, will be included in the CORE dotpet.

I changed my mind. Since not everyone will want to use BRLTTY and since it is quite a large file (> 1 MByte), I decided to make it a standalone dotpet. Anyway, I don't have a Braille Display, so couldn't really do many tests of any conclusive sort and don't like including things in foksy CORE that haven't had a lot of testing. You will probably only want brltty-x.x-i486 if you have a Braille Display.

If you do want to try it, make sure you read my brlttyREADME.txt file first. If by chance you have a Braille Display and get it going let me know the details if you don't mind, so that I can fine tune any follow up version.

You'll find it with the foksy CORE files on Eric's (Caneri's) site
(url in top post of this thread).

I've got this latest version running on 2.14R. However initially I could not get foksysetup to run. Tried simply clicking on it, and then tried running it from a terminal, but no joy. Eventually opened it in geany (not that I would understand the contents, but I thought I'd have a butchers anyway). I remembered that you could run some files from geany so I clicked 'execute' and that did the trick.
I'm getting used to the voice - I'm sure an experienced HAL or Jaws user would have no problem with it as I've heard some people using voices that sound like a talking watch on speed. A 'natural' voice would probably be too slow and tedious for a competent computer user.
Not that it's particularly necessary for package based on speech, but I have got a terminal setup with larger font and with white text on a dark background. Could be useful for people with some residual vision
(I nicked the script from GLinaccess: http://wearcam.org/glinaccess/README.HTM - some interesting stuff here, and also at http://lists.kde.org/?l=kde-accessibility&m=102676338828673&w=2, a linux accessibility HOW-TO, but I appreciate I'm drifting a little off-topic here)

I've got this latest version running on 2.14R. However initially I could not get foksysetup to run. Tried simply clicking on it, and then tried running it from a terminal, but no joy. Eventually opened it in geany (not that I would understand the contents, but I thought I'd have a butchers anyway). I remembered that you could run some files from geany so I clicked 'execute' and that did the trick.

In the latest version of fokSyf Eye R the command you should have entered is: foksy setup
[note that there must be a "space" between foksy and setup]
In older versions it was all one word.

Large fonts is a good idea for some. I'll look into that.

Actually, I also about to release a new version which includes cut and paste from X clipboard almost seamlessly from foksy, for those people also using X.

This version includes what I think is a very useful improvement for those running foksy in an X console (such as an xterm or rxvt):

This version includes p c (paste X clipboard) and p s (paste X highlighted text selection) into vi, (in addition to the usual middle mouse click method), for those using foksy with X.
e.g. you can use ctrl-a, on any focussed X window to select all text, and then in foksy, press p s to paste that text into vi.

Though fokSyf Eye R works perfectly well from a non-X commandline terminal, it also helps create a powerful hybrid CLI + X screen environment reader, when used alongside X application. For example, with p c and p s, foksy adds new power to users of Opera, or Seamonkey, or Firefox. Not only can the visually-impaired user use X screenmagnifiers, they can also, for example, press ctrl-a to select all text in any focussed X window, and then press p s in foksy to immediately paste that text into vi and have it thus read.
For further details and download:

http://www.murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic.php?t=26184

For the moment the paste facility, from the foksy menu, works only with v i. I'll probably be expanding that facility eventually. However, v i is particularly useful in this situation; using this new facility, many visually impaired users foksy will now be able to relatively easily cut and paste articles from a GUI browser into their own text documents for modification and use. This is in addition to the standard middle mouse button approach.

Clearly the next version will be 1.0.0
I'm not planning to upload that for a while now though.
I first want to test 0.9.9 more, and to port it to some
other Linux distributions
(starting with the Ubuntu family, since I have that),
which may take some time.

You cannot post new topics in this forumYou cannot reply to topics in this forumYou cannot edit your posts in this forumYou cannot delete your posts in this forumYou cannot vote in polls in this forumYou cannot attach files in this forumYou can download files in this forum